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The Art and Science of Relating: Help Your Jargon Be Helpful, with Alan Alda, Actor & Author, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
Jargon gets a bad reputation for good reasons. But there’s something good about jargon, and I think it should be explored because jargon hangs on, I think, in our speech because it has a usefulness. When people in the same profession have a word that stands for five pages of written knowledge, why say five pages of stuff when you can say one word? And if the other person understands it exactly the way you understand it, then jargon has usefulness. The trouble is we develop such specialized words that they’re not understood by people just a little distanced from our expertise. For instance, even show business, which you wouldn’t expect to have a technical jargon, even show business has it. Moviemaking. “Take this gobo and put it on the century over there and hurry up because this is the martini shot. And while you’re at it, bring me a half apple.” That’s not understood to most people, and it’s crystal clear to anyone who’s been on a movie set for awhile. I guess I have to explain it, or people will be writing you letters saying, what does all that mean? A gobo is a thing that blocks out light. A century is a century stand made by the century company many decades ago, and their name is on the stand. It’s a stand that holds up a light, or a gobo. The martini shot is the last shot of the day before you go home and have a martini. And a half apple is a box half the size of an apple box that you can put things on, like people who are too short. So that’s jargon for the movie set.
Jargon has another evil use aside from separating us from one another, and that’s when we want to use it to make ourselves look really smart. I’m smart, I talk like this. You can’t really talk like this, so you’re not as smart as me. A lot of us do this unconsciously, and it’s not necessary. We get more done if we open ourselves up. It’s really fun to be on the verge of saying something that is probably not going to be understood by the other person, and to say, wait a second. How can I say this in really plain language? What are the concepts that really matter in this? And if we do that sometimes we learn more about the jargon than we thought we knew. We humanize it. We reduce it to the simplest concept. And then the jargon sometimes gets cleaned off and polished of some of the luster of highfalutin that doesn’t help the jargon be helpful.